Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The language changed from ‘create’ to ‘support’, Senator Collins. The second stimulus package came out—$42 billion—but it is now not about creating jobs any more; it is about supporting jobs. That is now the best the government can do.

Is there any evidence that the $42 billion stimulus package is actually supporting any jobs? No; once again there is not. We have had two stimulus packages but there were no jobs created before Christmas with the first stimulus package. And in the second stimulus package how many jobs have been supported? We are not sure if there are any. That is the government’s record, having spent billions of dollars on job support and job creation.

The government has failed to create any jobs and it has even failed the smaller test—the easier test, the lower benchmark—of supporting jobs. It has even failed to do that. But what is far, far worse than failing to create jobs and failing to support jobs is, as my friend Senator Joyce has pointed out, that the government policy is now costing jobs—thousands of jobs throughout our state of Queensland. We learnt today that Xstrata has said that they may have to retrench up to 1,000 employees and sacrifice 4,000 future jobs. Just to remind Senator Collins about how bad it is, this appeared on page 1 of the Courier Mail:

In other employment news, a survey of 40 businesses with turnover up to $250 million has found 60 per cent had already frozen, or planned to freeze, staff hiring this financial year.

So not only has there been no creation and no support, but now the government is actually costing jobs. That is why the opposition does not support the government’s ETS. It has failed. The entire architecture of the government’s scheme is a failure. As far as jobs are concerned it has failed every single benchmark. On the front page of today’s Australian it said:

Modelling shows regional impact greater than forecast.

Labor heartland turns on ETS.

These are the workers of Gladstone and Mount Isa. The mayors are concerned that the towns will turn into ghost towns because there will be no jobs. Labor workers, who that lot opposite say they care about, will be without work. Real estate will fall and they will be without jobs. The mayors and the workers of those towns are petrified about the ETS.

No wonder the Labor heartland is falling apart; they know that this will cost jobs. Everyone throughout the country knows that, except, it seems, the Labor frontbench. Mr Rudd does not mind going to trendy conferences. That is great, but what about the people? What about the workers? What about the workers in Gladstone and Mount Isa? The one way the Labor Party will be able to win the seat of Gladstone in the state election is that there will be no-one left there. We are talking about a serious economic recession in Central Queensland because of these schemes.

And the hide of the Labor frontbench to come in here and preach to this side about working families! They are far more concerned about how they appear to the overseas set than they are about the workers of Central Queensland. That is the great failure of this government. Every time it comes to a choice between the latte set and the workers, they go with the latte set. That is the one thing that never changes about the Australian Labor Party: in a choice between workers and the latte set, the latte set wins every single time.